Working With AI When It's Frustrating: Lessons from a VXLAN Investigation
What a multi-hop PXE failure taught me about managing AI as a troubleshooting partner — not a magic solution.
Eric Marquez
I Told Copilot to SSH Into My Switches So I Didn't Have To
I was checking switch cabling and thought — why am I doing this manually? I asked GitHub Copilot to do it. That question led down a rabbit hole of credential backends, hanging regex loops, and an AI that admitted it was being dumb.
Here's a /26 — Figure Out the Address Plan
I handed GitHub Copilot a /26 subnet and told it to plan IP addressing for a two-switch iBGP fabric with spine uplinks. Then we deployed it. Here's what happened.
Hey Copilot, Can You SSH Into a Switch?
What happens when you point an AI at two factory-fresh SONiC switches and say 'figure it out' — a real-world experiment in AI-assisted network discovery.
EVPN and VRFs: The Security Architecture Your Data Center Actually Needs
How EVPN with VRF isolation extends from the physical fabric to the Windows Hyper-V virtual switch — and why it's a real security upgrade over VLANs.
What Are VRFs and How They Work
A practical, no-nonsense guide to Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) for engineers who know networking but haven't clicked with VRFs yet.
Future-Proofing Your Fabric: How BGP Unnumbered Makes IPv6 a Config Change, Not a Redesign
BGP unnumbered already uses IPv6 under the hood. Adding IPv6 routes to your fabric is activating one address family — not redesigning your network.
BGP Unnumbered: The Network Simplification You Didn't Know You Needed
How BGP unnumbered with loopback peering simplifies spine-leaf fabric operations at scale.
Building nrecon-mcp: From Idea to Design in One Night
The origin story of nrecon-mcp — an open-source MCP server that lets GitHub Copilot SSH into network devices and explore them autonomously — designed entirely in a single Copilot conversation.
When Git Gaslights You: The Line Ending Betrayal
That moment when git reset --hard does nothing and files stay modified. A deep dive into solving the Git line ending mystery that haunts cross-platform teams.